The Second
by Madame Rhea Di'Ey
Summary: They're just memories; two names between so many more. The tale of the second incarnation of the entity known as the Avatar. [One-shot, featuring the First Avatar and a lot of guessing.]


**A/N: **This contains a lot of speculation. And I mean it. Written for fun.

I do not own anything related to the Avatar Franchise. I do not own Avatar Wan; Kiira and Mei Li, as well as this one-shot are, however, mine.

* * *

When the Second Avatar is seven years old, she manages to stumble inside the place where worlds mend.

Of course, she doesn't know it. She's just another orphan lost in another snowstorm.

With snow coldly whipping her face and flakes sticking into her eyelashes and gluing her lids shut, the girl stumbles around on all fours, patting the ground in futile attempts to decipher where she is. She shuffles and shuffles and shuffles for Spirits-know-how-long, until she falls down somewhere and keeps on tumbling. And then there is warmth and the snow on her too-thin clothes that stick to her entire being in frozen wetness begins to melt. She wipes what she can away from her eyes and tries to blink.

_Why is there greenery in an ice-cave? _Is the first thing that runs through her mind. But there's grass beneath her and the air is warm, so she doesn't bother caring. Exhausted and hungry, the child is lulled to sleep by the rhythmic sound of waves softly crashing against solid surfaces. Through her slumber, she feels smooth, inhuman limbs gently whisk her – and then there is water, so much water. It's warm and she feels safe; she feels complete.

She forgets about that warm safety when it's gone, as if it never were.

When she wakes, there's a see-through man meditating at her side; if she had a voice, she would have screamed. He blinks warm, brown eyes open, and gives her an even warmer smile. "Hello, Kiira."

_Why does he know my name?_

The mute child simply blinks at him, tilting her head to the side. His smile becomes saddened. "I am Avatar Wan, although you probably don't know what that means," he speaks, before getting up and offering her his hand. Curiously, she places her much smaller one in the offered limb, marveling at how her fingers don't go straight through. He gently tugs, taking baby steps with her to the side of the pond that stands in the middle of the ice cave. Two koi fish swim in a circle, each following the other's tail.

_Pretty_.

The man crouches, still holding her hand, and his finger touches the water. There's a bright light that grows and swallows them hole, and then there is nothing.

When she awakens for the second time, she is in a strange place that looks like a thick, thick forest. She's warm and dry and no longer hungry; there's no pain in her bones, her head doesn't ache and her lungs no longer burn with ghostly fire. She marvels at the lack of ice in the surrounding environment, realizing at the same time that the same strange man – Avatar Wan, he called himself; strange name! – is still at her side, but he isn't see-through any longer; "Where are we?" she thinks, and gasps at the sound of her own voice when she realizes she's spoken it aloud.

Wan chuckles. "The Spirit World."

"Why are we here?" Kiira asks, fearful at the notion. The tales the Water Tribe folks say about the Spirits aren't all that pleasant. Who knows what lurks in these shadows...

"It's a long story," he sighs, again with that sad smile; "But we've got time. Plenty of it."

* * *

When the Second Avatar is sixteen, the world has already begun to have knowledge of her. She is Avatar Kiira; not a ghost of Avatar Wan, but just another face for the same cause.

The second mask among so many more to come.

She's pretty, in a strange way; her tan skin isn't as dark as it should be – it holds the pallor of the dead beneath the mocha hues. Her hair is long and colored like ink, but fair too luscious to look anything like Water Tribe. She's tall and lithe, not as curvaceous or as short as the women in her village typically are. She likes the cold and thrives in it, sleeping outside at all times, buried half into the snow and half into the otter-pinguins that seem to love her presence more than fish. She doesn't blend in and makes no effort to be civil.

She's savage. She acts like a man.

But her eyes are the bluest of blues, the color of the ocean, the color of sapphires the ladies of the Earth Kingdom sometimes adorn themselves with. Wan thinks she's superb in her abnormally wise youth. But it doesn't prevent his compassionate heart from aching when he sees her look so old; when he sees how aged and worn the soul beneath these sea-cobalt eyes seems to be – even if he knows it's not really that old; a little over a century's half, in fact. Because he knows a life of solitude and reprimand has made her be like this. Because he knows that the life the Spirits have decided she shall lead has brought on her troubles.

The gossiping ladies swear they see a strange man with far too little clothes hovering by her side at night, when the spirits dance in the sky and the stars glitter 'round the moon.

_They don't understand a thing_, Kiira says to Wan one night, and he chuckles, not disagreeing. He's taught her how to bend the water and the earth, he's nearly done with teaching her how to bend fire. Then air will follow and she'll be good to go – ready to wander throughout the world, across and back but on a different path. He plops down in the thick snow, wishing he could feel the coldness.

"Or maybe we're the ones who don't understand. We're not that human, you know."

She sharply glares at him – as much as she can, of course; she's far too timid to look menacing. _We're humans. That's why we're Avatars._

"Spirits with body, huh?"

They stare at the full moon in silence, one mute by birth and the other by choice. Kiira wakes at dawn to find him gone, a raging loneliness lingering a second too long at that realization before she disappears in a flurry of harsh wind and kicked-up snow, walking through a storm toward the next day.

* * *

When the Second Avatar is twenty-three, she is an old maid by all standards. Surely, she's traveled the world in flight and on foot countless times; has seen it all and learned too much. And has been courted by a decent amount of people thanks to her strength and thanks to her title. But none has managed to even move the heart she hides beneath her ribcage, that seems sometimes as frozen as the tundra of the Northern Tribe.

They call her the Ice Princess. Because she's virginal and silent; untouched and mute, much like an iceberg.

If he still had how, Wan would have been pretty tempted to go against the teachings he was brought up in and shwoosh these meanies off of a cliff.

They're sitting side by side at the Western Air Temple, legs dangling over the edge of the stone platform. The nuns managed to get her to wear Air Nomad garbs; even if she's now clad in a burnt orange kimono top with long bell sleeves, below the sash that holds it shut are pants and not a skirt. She made herself unseen at the mere sight of the dress they originally wanted to get her into. Her long black hair reaches down to mid-calf and is a pain to take care of, yet it's the only thing remotely feminine that the strange Avatar likes to keep on her person. Right now it's woven in a thick, loose braid, with wild strands from her bangs framing her face and dancing in the breeze. A storm is brewing overhead and she is eager to watch it pour.

"This was my home, once. They brought me here from the Northern Temple shortly after I was born and the spirits shown themselves to the monks to tell them of the destiny laid out for me," he quietly speaks, and his words prompt her to look at him. She tilts her head and he laughs. "They thought the nuns would be better suited to bring me up properly; my mother being one of them."

_I guess they were right_, Kiira responds after a long pause. _A mother's warmth is what any child longs for_.

He placed his arm around her shoulders with a sigh. "I'm sorry."

She smiles. _Don't be. You've been a pretty good replacement_.

"You were so tiny when you stumbled half-dead into the Oasis. Close to crossing over in silence, without the world ever knowing of your existence. The Spirits had to heal you."

She knows the story; he's saying it so often she can tell it by heart. _And then they sent you to guide me._

"They sent me to teach you, yes." he nods, absently, holding her a little tighter. After a long pause, he speaks again, in a tone so frail it makes him seem like a child that's afraid of the dark. "I'm sorry, Kii. I'm so sorry."

_Why?_

"Because I taught you all about the world and about bending, but I could never teach you what it means to be human."

She smiles prettily, and he can hear her laughing inside her head. _You're selling yourself short, Wan_.

* * *

When the Second Avatar is twenty-seven, she dies.

It's her twenty-eighth birthday, in fact, and she's vaguely aware of it as she's stabbed and burnt, like a wretched enchantress. The world has come to fear her. To fear the name Avatar and all which stands to it. The Secondcoming was deemed an abomination; she's got too strong, too emotional to be controlled. Silly humans, she was never yours. She might be the bridge between this world and the other, and one mask of many, but she belongs to the Spirits and to the world itself, not to those who walk upon the Earth.

There's agony, so much agony. She's in shackles and she'd like to scream, but she cannot. Wan is nowhere to be seen, and even if he were around, he couldn't do a thing.

She is alone and she is dying, dying the death she should have died twenty years ago.

"We can sacrifice her," a power-hungry elder tormentor speaks. "There'll be more, once she is gone. And we can try again, until the weapon is willing. Over and over. They'll never die, anyway." The crowd cheers, and Kiira shouts mute noise that never leaves her closed lips. She refuses to enter the Avatar State. She knows what that would do. So she accepts her fate, chin held high. Bloodied and dirty, her long braid cut messily into a short bob, she looks more royal than any noble ever did or ever will.

They don't care; they never did. They end her.

* * *

Thirteen years later, Wan and Kiira greet the Third Avatar. Mei Li is a girl with pretty hair in the color of rust and eyes like forests.

She's innocent, the only child of a widowed merchant.

The Second swears to protect that innocence of hers. And many years later, when Mei Li is a widow in her own turn with a child to look after and a world on the edge of a war that needs saving, Kiira sees the haunted look in those brilliant emerald eyes and wonders if it's Fate's will or her own incompetence that has put that hollowness in them. Wan's hand is on hers, like all these years ago; but now they're both see-through ghosts of the past that stalk the Earth and cannot do a thing to interfere. "It's not your fault," he tells her, soft and fragile.

She laughs mirthlessly. "Isn't it?"

"It's nobody's fault, Kii," he says, as gentle as always and as patient as ever.

"We're human. Far too human," she carries on as if she never heard him. "That's why we suffer. We have emotions that stand in the path of our duty."

She squeezes back the hand that clasps her own. Wan sighs. "I think you're wrong. These emotions are what help us fulfill our duty. If we didn't have them, we wouldn't do what's right."

Kiira is far too tired to argue. She just leans onto him, too worn out to stand on her own. She was doomed the second the Spirits tied them together like the Moon is tied with the Ocean. Doomed even further the moment he became everything she had; and her fate was sealed when she realized she's in love with a ghost of the past, a translucent memory of someone that's her but not quite.

He'll never know. And that's alright. The more other Avatars are born, the more they are forgotten. Like old tombs in a cemetery, they are two names written on a list before many, many others. So when the statues of all Avatars are built and aligned, no one ever notices that throughout time, the statue of the Second moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with that of the First.


End file.
